The Artist is Present The Geography of Serendipity: A Meditation on Presence and the Art of Being Found

The first half of my life unfolded with the peculiar grace of someone who seemed to inhabit the exact intersection where intention meets circumstance, where desire aligns with possibility in ways that felt less like luck than like a form of unconscious navigation. I always seemed to find myself in the right place at precisely the right moment, not through careful planning or deliberate strategy, but through something more mysterious. As if I possessed an internal compass that pointed not toward magnetic north, but toward the places where life was most intensely happening. I would wander into any given day with nothing more than curiosity as my guide. And wherever my feet carried me, things were unfolding: free concerts spilling from unexpected venues, friendships that bloomed from single conversations with strangers, art collectives that invited participation from passersby, markets where vendors offered tastes of their lives along with their wares, job opportunities that materialized from casual encounters. I moved through the world resonating with confidence and optimism, and the universe seemed to return that energy with compound interest.

One morning, while walking through the familiar chaos of New York City’s streets with no particular destination in mind, I decided on impulse to visit the Museum of Modern Art. The decision felt as arbitrary and inevitable as most of the choices that had shaped my life; a slight gravitational pull toward something I couldn’t quite name. The museum was featuring a Tim Burton retrospective, showcasing the director’s strangest and most distinctive creative artifacts spanning his career before 2010. The exhibition included everything from the delicate scissor-fingered sketches that would become Edward Scissorhands to the whimsical darkness of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from the stop-motion poetry of The Nightmare Before Christmas to the satirical aliens of Mars Attacks! I wandered through Burton’s imagination made manifest, absorbing the visual language of an artist who had somehow made the macabre feel tender, the strange feel familiar.

Then I stepped into a large, dimly lit room with off-white walls and dark granite floors that seemed to breathe with anticipation. A small crowd formed a quiet perimeter around the center of the space, where a simple wooden table sat positioned between two matching chairs like an altar designed for the most intimate form of communion. In one chair sat a woman with jet-black hair, twisted elegantly over her shoulder, wearing a long red dress that pooled around her feet and seemed to anchor her to the earth itself. Across from her sat a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a carefully groomed beard, dressed in a black suit with a red tie and, incongruously, high-top Converse shoes that suggested both formality and rebellion. They sat with hands folded in their laps, maintaining unbroken eye contact with an intensity that seemed to alter the very atmosphere of the room. The gathered crowd watched in complete silence, as if we were witnessing something sacred.

It was utterly captivating. It wasn’t just the visual composition of the scene, but the emotional weight that seemed to press against everyone present, the sense that we were observing something both deeply personal and universally significant.

The woman was Marina Abramović, though I didn’t know her name at the time. Over more than four decades, Abramović has created nearly fifty conceptual and performance pieces that explore the boundaries between artist and audience, between vulnerability and power, and between the body as an instrument and the body as a site of meaning. Her work includes videos, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative pieces that consistently challenge both herself and her viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature and connection. One of her most infamous early works, Rhythm 0, involved her standing motionless in a gallery for six hours while seventy-two objects were placed on a table for visitors to use on her body in any way they wished. The objects included items that could provide pleasure: a rose, a feather, perfume, honey, alongside those designed to inflict pain or harm: bread, wine, scissors, a knife, a whip, a scalpel, and, most provocatively, a gun loaded with a single bullet.

The performance revealed something disturbing about human behavior when consequences are removed. She was fed, kissed, drawn on, stripped, cut, and even made to aim the loaded gun at her own neck. After six hours—exactly as planned—she began moving toward the audience, and they fled, suddenly terrified of confrontation with someone they had treated as an object. Abramović was testing the limits of vulnerability, exploring what happens when one person makes themselves completely available to the actions of others. She later described how the atmosphere quickly turned violent, revealing something unsettling about collective human behavior when individual accountability disappears.

However, the performance I was witnessing at MoMA explored entirely different territory: the profound possibility of connection achieved through shared presence. The Artist Is Present was about the transformative power of sustained, silent eye contact between strangers. This retrospective traced over four decades of her career and featured the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever undertaken in a museum setting. She described the central performance as life-changing, both for herself and for participants, highlighting the depth and intimacy that could be achieved through the simple act of looking directly into another human being’s eyes for an extended period.

Participants who sat across from her described the experience as emotionally overwhelming, even transformative. There’s something that happens when you maintain eye contact with a stranger long enough for social conventions to dissolve. You begin to see yourself reflected through their gaze, and that reflection isn’t always comfortable or easy to accept. The register of participants included celebrities such as James Franco, Lou Reed, Alan Rickman, and Björk, as well as anonymous visitors who found themselves unexpectedly moved by the encounter.

At the time, I had no idea who the man in the black suit was, though something about the energy between them felt different from the other interactions I had observed. Before he sat down, Marina Abramović and Ulay—her former lover and longtime artistic collaborator—hadn’t seen each other in years. Their relationship had ended dramatically and painfully, both personally and professionally. But here they were, separated only by a small wooden table and decades of accumulated hurt and love and memory. The emotion that passed between them in those moments was so palpable it seemed to alter the air in the room. You could feel the collective intake of breath from the crowd watching as recognition spread through the room. Afterward, he stood and walked away without saying a word, leaving behind a silence that felt heavy with everything that couldn’t be spoken.

I had stumbled into one of the most emotionally charged moments in contemporary performance art history, completely by accident. I came to the museum because I had heard about Tim Burton’s whimsical darkness and left thinking about silence, connection, and the particular intimacy we rarely allow ourselves to feel in our hyper-connected but emotionally distant age. Many have lost the ability to sit in silence, with themselves or others. We’re constantly filling empty spaces with noise, distraction, stimulation, anything to avoid the uncomfortable confrontation with our own presence or the presence of others. In losing this capacity for stillness, we may be losing something essential about what it means to be human, something we may never be able to explain or recover.

Years later, I found myself in Texas, talking with a friend who had recently entered my life. Our conversation organically wandered, as conversations do, toward art and its capacity to create meaning from experience. When Marina Abramović’s name arose, we realized with the peculiar shock of impossible coincidence that we had both been at MoMA that same day, both watching The Artist Is Present, both witnesses to that extraordinary moment when Abramović and Ulay sat together in silence, as their entire history played out in the space between their eyes.

Art possesses these remarkable capacities for exploring the depths of human experience, though the response is never predictable. Some people encounter profound works and miss the significance entirely, treating them as mere entertainment or curiosity. Others find themselves fundamentally altered by the encounter, their understanding of themselves and the world shifted in subtle but permanent ways. And sometimes, perhaps most mysteriously, art creates the conditions for human connections that might never have occurred otherwise. Some friendships are forged on the foundation of shared aesthetic experience, bound together by the recognition that we witnessed something meaningful at the same moment in time.

And to think that I just happened to be walking by that morning, following nothing more than an impulse to see Tim Burton’s imagination made visible, only to stumble into meditation on presence, vulnerability, and the possibility of human connection. The geography of serendipity operates by rules I’ve never been able to understand; however, I’ve learned to trust its guidance, to remain open to the possibility that the most significant experiences often arrive disguised as ordinary moments, waiting for us to recognize their importance only in retrospect.